Lance Izumi: Universal preschool doesn't work

Barack Obama's big education push in his State of the Union address was to propose a universal government-run preschool program, which he claimed would improve student outcomes and save taxpayers money. Similar arguments in California were repudiated in 2006 when voters delivered a 61-39 landslide defeat to a much-ballyhooed preschool initiative.

The brainchild of liberal Hollywood actor/director Rob Reiner, Proposition 82, like the President Obama's new proposal, would've made a government-run preschool education available to all children, regardless of income background. Reiner and his campaign trotted out the same claims as President Obama did in his State of the Union and cited the same "evidence."

Yet, that "evidence" was as weak, incomplete and deceptive then as it remains now.

Both Reiner and Obama pointed to supposed research showing that for every tax dollar invested in government-run preschool several times that amount would be saved by higher graduation rates, lower teen pregnancy and reduced violent crime. The trouble is that there is no such long-term evidence for children of all income backgrounds.

Reiner and his campaign made much of a RAND Corp. study that purported to show what universal government-run preschool would have cost and student-outcome benefits. However, even RAND admitted that there was only one study done on the long-term impact of preschool on non-poor children. According to RAND, this study found that non-poor children attending preschool "were no better off in terms of high school or college completion, earnings, or criminal justice system involvement than those not going to any preschool." In other words, President Obama's argument for universal government-run preschool is totally baseless.

Further, even evidence of the impact of preschool on low-income children is mixed. True, after longitudinal study, a few preschool programs have shown positive results, but there are critical caveats.

First, the reasons for the positive results are tied to very specific elements, such as long-term parental involvement, and there is no guarantee that such elements will be included in Obama's program. Further, some of these "positive" studies are based on tiny sample sizes and have never been replicated.

Finally, there's a lot of data to show that whatever beneficial impact preschool has on poor children fades away after a few years.

A recent report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services tracked a group of 5,000 children through the third grade. Among those children, some were randomly assigned to a group entered into the federal Head Start preschool program, while others were part of a group that wasn't. Head Start, created in 1965, is designed to improve the readiness for poor children for kindergarten.

The HHS study found that any beneficial effects experienced by the Head Start group evaporated by the third grade. As education analyst Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation noted, "Washington's 48-year-old experiment with federal preschool has failed to deliver long-lasting, positive developments for its participants." Yet, despite this glaring failure, on which has been spent hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, Obama aims to inflate the federal government's role in preschool to an unprecedented level.

Perhaps most troubling is the fact that Obama ignores strong evidence that preschool attendance has a negative impact on the behavior of children. During the debate over the Reiner initiative, a large-scale Stanford-UC Berkeley study was publicized showing that preschool has a negative effect on children's social skills and emotional development. The HHS study came to similar conclusions.

In his State of the Union message, President Obama said, "Let's do what works, and make sure none of our children start the race for life already behind." Mr. President, doing what works means not doing what doesn't work. Government-run universal preschool has not been shown to work, so let's not do it.

Lance T. Izumi is Koret senior fellow and senior director ofeducation studies at the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco.

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